The invention we are disclosing and claiming here had its origins in our work developing a software package ('application') for online electronic document management, known as the SmartVault™ application, as an add-on to the well-known QUICKBOOKS® small-business accounting software published by Intuit Inc. In hindsight, it became apparent that our invention can be adapted to work with a wide variety of other software applications.
The user could also invoke the attachment functionality in other conventional ways, such as (i) by selecting the appropriate item from the menu 230; or (ii) by dragging and dropping a file from an external application such as Windows Explorer; or (iii) by actuating a suitable scanner, such as the commercially-available FUJITSU® SCANSNAP™ scanner, to scan a hard-copy document into an electronic image, possibly invoking optical character recognition functions in the process.
Some host applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, provide extensive software development kits (SDK) that enable third-party developers to create plug-in applications that can include a rich graphical user interface to provide an apparently-seamless extension of the functionality of the host application. Unfortunately, many and even most host applications, including QuickBooks, provide little if any support for such a capability in their SDKs (assuming they have an SDK at all).
Some add-on applications for QuickBooks offer a limited extended-GUI capability along these lines. None, however, provides what we considered a desirable user experience from a document-management perspective.
Some of these QuickBooks add-on products suffer from what we consider to be a significant usability problem: When (for example) a user navigates from one data record to another in QuickBooks, these add-on products do not automatically provide a conspicuous visual indicator, such as for example an icon on the QuickBooks toolbar, to let the user know that related information is available for that particular data record. If the user wants to find out whether any such documents are available, s/he must intentionally navigate to a QuickBooks menu item and click on it (or perform some other action). In our view, this leads to a lower-quality user experience.
Some such add-on products attempt to overcome this usability problem by writing a message in the memo field of the QuickBooks data record (for example, “documents have been saved for this transaction”), and/or by appending a special character such as an asterisk * to the end of the memo field. The difficulty with this approach, however, is that the user could accidentally or inadvertently overwrite the message or the special character if s/he were to edit the memo field. Moreover, a user could simply overlook the special character and not realize that documents associated with the data record were available.